As a part of our ministry, our contact asked us to go to one of the killing fields nearby. This memorial site is the largest out of over 300 killing fields in Cambodia. If you are like me, I wasn’t really sure about the history of the killing fields. I mean, it was before I was born, right?
In Cambodia, there was a ruler named Pol Pot. He and the Khmer Rouge, the military, wanted to take over Cambodia and start, “fresh”. So, what they did was they decided that they needed to kill the educated, the ones that could overtake Pol Pot and his plans. So, if you had any kind of education, wore glasses, or anything of that sort, you were a target. How do you dispose of people, cheaply, and effectively. One way was to starve them and work them to death. Another way was the killing fields.
Toward the beginning of the killing fields, trucks with about 60-70 people each would arrive two or three times a week, toward the end, it was 2 or 3 a day. People would be brought here to be murdered. They were told that they were being relocated, or getting a new house, but really they were being sentenced to death. If you want to know more about the killing fields you can go to this website:
For me, no website could ever compare to actually being there. To hear the stories of the survivors and to see the ones that didn’t. I can’t describe to you in one blog what I saw… how I felt… but I can give you a few big ones.
1. The graves. They were just holes in the ground, open wounds, where people were killed and thrown in. Now these deaths weren’t a gun shot to the head, gas chambers, or even hangings. These people were hit with hammers, decapitated with garden hoes, beaten, raped, killed with the branches of trees, anything cheep, anything they could find.
2. The bones and clothes. At this particular site, there were over 8,886 bodies found in 86 graves. The bones and clothes are on display to see. There were also bones and clothing coming up from the ground from the graves that haven’t been excavated. I was walking along the path and there was teeth, human teeth, coming out of the ground. Every few months people come around and pick up the bones and clothes that come up, but they keep coming up. That place is very unsettled. There is also a large building where there are thousands of human skulls and bones on display to remember the 6 million Khmer people that died.
3. The killing tree. This was the hardest thing for me to see. There is a huge tree next to one of the mass graves. This particular grave was filled with women and children… most of the women didn’t have clothes on. This tree was given its name because of the hundreds of children killed on this tree. Khmer Rouge soldiers would pick children up by their legs and smash them against the tree until they were dead. Then, they would throw the kids into the ditch with their mothers. I couldn’t look at the tree without feeling sick to my stomach.
How has this been hidden from me for so long? How could I have not known? How could the world not know? These killings went on for almost 4 years… But it didn’t stop there. The Khmer Rouge was still had a seat in the United Nations, even when they had fled office and it hasn’t been until this decade that people are being put on trial for what happened a little over 30 years ago…
Screams of mothers, children, fathers, brothers, teachers, actors, drown out by speakers playing national tunes…
Why has this been silenced?
